January 16, 2005

Pontin responds

Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of Technology Review, has responded to the accusations that he was unfair to Aubrey de Grey in his recent editorial. Here's the comment he posted earlier today in response to my earlier post on the matter:

Dear transhumanists,

Thank you for your posts to the technologyreview.com site. I've
read them all with great interest. You're a passionate group!

Let me begin by writing: as many of you suggested, we will
invite Aubrey de Grey to reply to Dr. Nuland's article, the leader
"Be Sane about Anti-Aging Science," and my editorial "Against
Transcendence." You can read Mr. de Grey on
www.technologyreview.com early next week.

That said, when an editor so completely fails to express his
meaning to his readers, he may be tempted to try again. A few
notes to that end.

1. I recognize the anger in many of your posts, and apologize if I
have offended any of you.

When I called Mr. de Grey a "troll" it was of course a literary
device: a reference to a line earlier in my editorial where I
quoted the writer Bruce Stirling about the paradox that those
who were most intersted in using technology to transcend
human nature often lived circumscribed lives that seemed
anything but transcendent when viewed from the outside.
Stirling says that people who take transcendence seriously "end
up turning into trolls." This is my personal view. However,
neither Dr. Nuland's article, which I commissioned, nor our
leader on anti-aging, which I edited, made this point.

2. My list of the ways that Mr. de Grey seemed circumscribed by
his humanity was not intended as an ad hominem attack on de
Grey. An hominem attack seeks to discredit an argument by
attacking the person who makes it. As many of you noted, I did
not seriously grapple with Mr. de Grey's views in my editorial.

This is because my editorial was written as an introduction, by
the editor-in-chief, to the print edition of Technology Review.
An exhaustive list of all the reasons why I think de Grey
mistaken in his confidence that human cellular aging can be
reversed would have been redundant. The two other articles on
biogerontology, in addition to a synopsis of a scholarly
publication on the role of mitochondria in the diseases of aging,
expressed all I believe about biogerontology.

Those views, in short, are as follows: while I am fascinated by
the study of how and why human tissues age, I think it
exceedingly unlikely that human aging can be "defeated" in any
meaningful sense. All organisms--indeed, all things in
creation--age. I think it possible that we might one day extend
human lifespan significantly, and I am reasonably sure that in
the next 50 years we will "compress the morbidity" of the elderly
to a brief period before death. I have to note that most serious,
working, responsible biogerontologists published regularly by
peer review journals would agree with me--with the possible
exception of Cynthia Kenyon at UCSF, who entertains dramatic
hopes for human life extension, and who has significantly
extended the life span of nemotodes.

My editorial was about what it said it was about: it was written
"against transcendence." It was not written about Aubrey de
Grey.

3. Finally, and I write this with a little trepidation, many of your
posts reveal a degree of misinformation about Mr. de Grey's
accomplishments and publications.

I would not accuse Mr. de Grey, whom I have never met, of
being a charlatan. But there is a certain vaguness in the
transhumanist community about his role in the Department of
Genetics at Cambridge University. Mr. de Grey is not an
academic biogerontologist. He is the computer support
for a research team in Cambridge's Genetics Department. His
formal academic background is in computer science. If you
consult Mr. de Grey's publications in a resource like PubMed,
you will see they vary more than glowing profiles of de Grey
sometimes imply. For instance, his contributions to Science and
Biogerontology are commentary and letters. His publications in
Tends in Biotechnology and Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences were not, strictly speaking, peer reviewed.

My assessment of Aubrey de Grey would be that of the
biogerontologist Jay Olshansky: "I am a big fan of Aubrey. We
need him. I disagree with some of his conclusions, but in science
that's OK. That's what advances the field."

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George Dvorsky

Canadian futurist, science writer, and ethicist, George Dvorsky has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology—particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He is a contributing editor at io9, the Chairman of the Board at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the program director for the Rights of Non-Human Persons program.